Turn Your Content into Customers
The Next Evolution in Customer Acquisition:
The Social Content Platform
Software Videos White Papers
Blogs Webinars News Press Releases Podcasts Infographics Presentations
Connect
Publish
Search Blogs
Email Groups Connect Company web Partner web
Social Login
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Validated info All content views Social context Email Call Social CRMEngage
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oday’s organizations can tap into a host of tactics, channels, and tools to connect with prospective buyers, including content marketing, social networking, and real-time analytics. Consider how content marketing alone is changing the B2B marketing landscape. Today it accounts for 26% of B2B marketing budgets, according to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute. Moreover, the Content Marketing Institute found that 60% of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets over the next year.1 And Forrester Research projects the USinteractive marketing spend (covering social media, email marketing, mobile marketing, display and search marketing) to climb from 21% of overall ad spend to 35% between 2012 and 2016.2
Yet the majority of companies struggle to take advantage of the power of content marketing, social networking, and real-time analytics. Marketing spends lots of budget and grapples with manual, inefficient processes to develop, promote, and share content across multiple channels due to a multi-step process using disconnected tools. Plus, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of and ensure up-to-date versions of content appearing on third-party outlets, such as partner sites. And in spite of their investments and efforts, most marketers are frustrated at their inability to effectively sway content consumers and advocates to promote content using today’s social-networking tools.
At the same time, salespeople find it hard to follow up with and engage prospective buyers because of lack of insight into what prospects are doing and talking about online. Even the promise of real-time analytics falls short — organizations are challenged to consistently capture data when content is spread across multiple channels and sites.
Today’s Decentralized and Manual Content Marketing Process
Even end users — the target audience for all this content — are challenged to find quality business and technical content. This is due to three main reasons. First, the limits of online search force users to jump from site to site trying to track down content of interest. Second, once they do find content, it’s usually not vetted by a community of trusted peers and colleagues, making it difficult to determine whether the content is worth their time. Finally, because end users often come across standalone content — such as a single white paper on a landing page — they see it out of context and don’t get a solid grasp of all relevant information offered by an organization.
The New Marketing Norm Today’s marketers need to: • Deliver content across more
channels than ever before. • Connect with prospective
buyers online. • Tap into the social
influence of advocates.
1Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends 2Forrester Research, Inc., Interactive Marketing Forecasts, 2011 to 2016 (US)
THE SOCIAL CONTENT PLATFORM • 1
STEP 2
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STEP 1
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Web Blog Partner Content Content ContentSTEP 3
Collect Leads
Lead Form First Name Last Name Job Title Address Email Phone Company Employees Zip Code Birthdate Marital StatusSTEP 4
Qualify
One-off ID info Viewed content?
STEP 5
Engage
Email Mail Call Email Partner Search Email Partner SearchWhy Content Marketers Struggle to
Reap Full Value from Content
To date, organizations have turned to a number of automation tools to help with their marketing efforts. However, none focus on the content issues addressed earlier. Following are some of the more popular tools:
Content Management Systems (CMS). Designed to help manage website content, CMS solutions don’t address the issues of promoting and sharing stand-alone downloadable content (such as PDFs), or distributing content across third-party sites and then following up with those who show an interest in this content.
Content sharing tools/sites like SlideShare and Scribd. These destination sites were built with consumers in mind, and are focused on helping end users publish content, not on helping companies create content once, publish and distribute it in multiple places with ease, or convert views into engagement.
Marketing automation software. This software is designed to track content consumption and help organizations take action once someone has viewed their content. What’s missing is a means to initiate content views.
How B2B Marketers Can Amplify
the Impact of their Content
To overcome these challenges, companies need a solution that enables them to:
• Centrally deploy, manage and promote content: post once, deliver everywhere.
• Extend the reach of those who view their content: one view becomes many.
• Be alerted when someone interacts with their content and enables follow-up and engagement.
• Gain insight into how their content is viewed and shared.
The answer is a groundbreaking solution — a social content
platform — based on three key concepts:
1. Cloud publishing, where content is centrally stored, published, and managed. But this cloud is unlike traditional cloud content storage such as Dropbox, SkyDrive and Apple’s iCloud, which are built to keep content private among one or more parties. Instead, this model is focused on publicly and automatically promoting and sharing with all people who are interested in the content.
With cloud publishing, B2B companies upload an unlimited amount of content, allowing them to deliver all the content that prospective buyers seek as they conduct their research. Companies can manage the deployment and updating of the content in numerous ways. For example, the can schedule content, ensuring white papers, videos, articles and other content are published and promoted at the optimal time. These companies can also easily promote and distribute their content library by copying and pasting — or emailing — simple HTML code that can be placed on any website. Whenever the company updates content with cloud publishing, their content library is automatically and instantaneously updated on every site where it appears.
Tapping into
“Pass-around Power”
“As social sharing continues to be integrated into
everything we do, the value and importance of our social networks will grow increasingly vital to marketers. Technology will also continue to enable marketers to leverage deeper and deeper relationships at scale, making the most influential channel peer influence, the most important channel to successfully market any product.”
– CROwDTAP, THE POwER OF PEER INFLUENCE
2. Single Sign-On LEAD GENERATION WITH SOCIAL LOGIN, in which any piece of B2B content published by the platform that resides on any website, blog or social network can be secured by placing a social login (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) in front of the content. This enables one-click frictionless lead collection without the need for long lead collection forms (that often have large drop-off rates), provides authenticated viewer information (versus one-off information that cannot be verified), and opens up new ways to engage with prospects using social networks. 3. Social Content Analytics & Engagement, in which information about content views and shares is presented within a broader context that includes other content viewed, as well as viewer and company connections, recommendations and reviews by their peers. Companies can automatically feed this information into their marketing and sales automation system so sales can get insight into prospects and their actions and interests. And they can engage with viewers via a variety of communications, from messaging to social network connections, to further the conversation sparked by their content.
The Benefits of a Social Content Platform —
Introducing PaperShare
With PaperShare, B2B marketers gain the ability to drive measurable improvements:
Increase content marketing ROI. By storing, updating, and distributing content from one spot, companies save significant time and headaches. Plus they boost their reach by automatically — and intelligently — promoting their content to all relevant social and search channels. Just as important, with users distributing content via social channels, organizations can get in front of a segment of people previously beyond their reach.
Convert analytics into actionable intelligence. With a real-time view into content effectiveness based on content views, shares, and recommendations, marketers can steadily improve their content. At the same time, they can identify and engage advocates who are interested in relevant topics and/or are talking up their offerings.
Social Login Extend Reach
Social
Content
Platform
Connect Engage Analytics Publish Finished Content Automated content marketing process with PaperShare’s Social Content Platform THE SOCIAL CONTENT PLATFORM • 3Marketers should “restore community marketing” “Forrester’s data confirms
that customers prefer to first turn to their professional and social networks to get feedback and references on products and services. Community interactions influence a buyers’ decision, therefore marketers need to take a more active role in setting and executing their community strategy.”1
1Forrester Research, Inc., Kim Celestre’s Blog, Marketing Is Alive and Well., August 24, 2012
Case Studies
According to Candyce Plante, Director of Marketing at DynamicOps (a technology company recently acquired by VMware), “With PaperShare, we now can measure the social impact of our content, including views, shares and third-party validations, on each of our business and technical documents. For DynamicOps this is a perfect way to get our message out and at the same time meet new business contacts.” Another customer, Scense, a high-tech company in the Netherlands, gained the following results from using PaperShare:
• 30% increase in white paper and document downloads.
• Overall increase in reads and a sizable uptake in web traffic, leading to a large influx of qualified sales leads and multiple connections to a new ecosystem of partners.
• Heightened awareness of Scense outside of the Netherlands due to the global reach and community on PaperShare.
Conclusion: From Content to Customers
At its core, content marketing is about delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. But it’s easier said than done with today’s empowered buyers conducting research online and turning to their peers instead of vendors for information and advice.
PaperShare’s social content platform combines the promise of content marketing with the power of social networking and real-time analytics, making it possible for marketers to:
• Think and act like publishers, easily distributing and managing a steady stream of content across channels.
• Encourage content to go viral via social networking.
• Maintain momentum by making prospective buyers aware of information that matches their interests.
• Readily engage with prospects to continue the conversation fueled by their content.
To understand how your business can benefit from the social content platform, please contact PaperShare about their no-charge trial Premium Service. This offering features support for unlimited content uploads, the ability to publish once and update everywhere, premium analytics about prospects and influencers, tools to engage with users, and integration with social networks and marketing automation software.
For more information, contact PaperShare at info@papershare.com or 425-803-0962. 303 Parkplace Center Suite G–131 Kirkland, WA 98033 425.803.0962 www.papershare.com info@papershare.com
Turn Your Content into Customers™ Marketers Must Become Publishers
Marketers don’t convert prospective buyers into leads or advocates with a single content asset. Rather, they must publish a steady stream of relevant content — just like publishers — to attract, engage, and win over their target audience.
